It’s not often that someone says they want to work in the public sector when they grow up. But when Mairany Anaya looks back now, she remembers what pushed her in this direction: her older sister encouraged her to volunteer at children’s summer day camps run by the city. Fast forward to over 10 years later and Mairany continues to work for her local community, now in managing public transportation programs. 

Mairany’s path to working for the public sector in transportation was far from linear. As a first-generation, low-income college student admitted to Wellesley College through QuestBridge, she started as a Computer Science major, thinking it would be a practical field that could lead to a lucrative career in technology. However, based on her ongoing interest in sustainability and environmental issues — ignited through volunteering with a recycling program in high school — Mairany changed her major to Geosciences.

“I knew that I wanted to do something for the greater good, whatever that was, whatever that looked like. I wanted to work on something that benefited people, whether it was a specific community, a specific group that faced specific challenges,” she shares.

That pivot opened a door that bridged her interest in the environment to an actual career. While most of her classmates at Wellesley were seeking corporate careers after graduation, Mairany joined AmeriCorps, working as a Climate Fellow for the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority. When the fellowship ended, she explored new public sector experiences, like working as a scientist detecting invasive pests for the Food and Agriculture department for the State of California or doing housing policy planning. Each opportunity helped her understand what she was truly passionate about, which coincidentally led her back to the San Bernardino Transportation Authority as a program administrator.

Though she grew up in car-culture-focused Southern California, going to college at Wellesley — which is a short train ride from Boston — exposed her to what it’s like to get around on the metro. “Getting people out of their cars is such an easy way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,” she says, “We just really need to work on policies, projects, [and] initiatives that get people to do that, which is what I do now.”

Today, Mairany is involved in various aspects of public transit for a large metropolitan area, doing everything from marketing plans that encourage ridership, to improving traffic flows.

She also recognizes that while geosciences helped her gain some analytical and technical skills as a working professional, she would like to gain more administrative experience — so in addition to her full-time work, she is completing a Master’s in Public Administration.

When she considers her path so far, Mairany thinks it is important that people recognize that QuestBridge Scholars are more interdisciplinary than people might assume. “I don’t hear of too many Scholars being in the public sector, but we are definitely out there and it’s a very rewarding career path.”